It’s been two years and seven months since I’ve had longer than a two hour window of time to myself. Caregiving has been my focus and time commitment and everything else had to come in between. The first two weeks while Cy attends school for the first time have been an adjustment. I had forgotten what it was like to take a breath, a shower and just think, uninterrupted during a time that wasn’t a nap.
With that new freedom and expanse of time comes the inevitable what takes that place and what fills up? Some of what I’ve found myself doing is sifting through the five-hundred something tabs that have been lingering in my safari iphone browser.
I’ve been coming back to a few links that I’ve looked at and I’ve been putting them in a folder called ‘Artists to look up’. Here is a small selection from my research. It’s nice to go back to remember work that was striking when you encounter it and what made me save it at the time.
These little brass hands kept appearing in my memory by the viennese artist Carl Auböck. Looking deeper into his whimsical bronze and metal work I realized it’s a lineage of four generations of sons, all named after their grandfather’s legacy which began in the early 1900s.
Her work ignored for decades Bernice Bing was an Asian American painter, a lesbian and a community activist. Her intense abstract expressionist paintings and her nickname ‘Bingo’ are worth a second look. The New York Times wrote about her show at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 2023.
In 2012 the now defunct Luxembourg & Dayan showed paintings by cult figure Domenico Gnoli. His works today feel contemporary and like the world seen through the eyes of a child. He only painted till he died of cancer at 36, The New York Times also wrote a review of the show calling him a ‘precocious beginner’.
Seeing these Karl Gerstner collages in person last year at Meredith Rosen Gallery uptown felt like a revelation. They were both at once buzzy in color but meticulously executed and in pristine shape considering they were created in the 1970s. Gerstner is primarily known as a graphic designer and typographer but these gems crossed over to jeweled artworks.
Loosing the battle to brain cancer in 2023, at age 50 Lin May Saeed was known for her gentle sculptures and sculptural reliefs. Her works were reflections of our natural world with a particular empathy towards animals. She chose difficult materials like styrofoam, but also steel and bronze to shed light on animal ethics and animal rights.
Another young rising female artist Lumin Wakoa also lost the battle to brain cancer at age 43. She used memories to construct her paintings, suggesting “wanting to capture being inside on a warm day when the light starts to turn cool and seeing dust suspended in the air.”
A chance walkthrough at MoMA led me to discover Samia Halaby’s kinetic paintings. She is a Palestinian artist, activist, scholar, and educator who was pioneering in her work with digital media in the 1980s. Full of color, strange shapes and the beginnings of pattern and gradient her digital paintings feel right at home in this digital age of 2025.
The Rosemarie Beck foundation has done a fantastic job of preserving her legacy. I discovered her work through a viewing room that the artist Georgia McGovern curated. These linocut prints were my favorite but of course I’m biased as a printmaker.
I wanted to share a playlist for the speed of early September. Somehow it always feels as though the first two weeks after the summer the city comes alive and there’s a million things to see, do and check out. Maybe it will slow down as the weather starts to cool off.